Tag Archives: Essen 2015

So you’ve finished and play-tested your proto-type and you’re ready to look for a printer. Getting your game printed can feel like a bit of a mine-field and depending on who you ask you’re going to get some wildly varying quotes for printing. Five of the first things to bare in mind are:

You’re going to want prototypes and these are best done with the printer you’re going to be using to produce the game. This way you get to catch places where they may not have understood what you want up front

If you’re going to use traditional distribution to get your game into stores then you’re going to want to have a very low base cost as retailers look for very large margins on games (up to and over 50%)

The printer you choose should be experienced at producing games and have the technical ability to realise your dream. Make sure that you look carefully at what they’ve produced before and if possible…get references

They should be easy to communicate with and responsive. If you ask a company for something and it takes two weeks to get a response (to a simple question) you should consider walking away. When you’re on tight deadlines the last thing you want is an unresponsive printer

You’ll need them to be flexible at times. You need to feel like your printer is coming with you on your boardgame journey and they’re willing to work with you to make your game work

So where to print? If you run a google search for game printing you’ll get a raft of companies coming up that print games. For early good looking prototypes Game Crafter is a good first stop but if you’re going to require non-standard pieces or large print runs at a low cost per game then you probably don’t want to use them for your production run. If you live in Western Europe or the US you’ll find a lot of great printers. The benefits of printing in country are:

You can go and sit down with the printers and brief them in person (In the US this could involve a plane flight 🙂 )

You don’t have to worry too much about transportation

Depending on where you live and where you’re transporting to import duties and VAT cease to be so much of a problem for you

People speak your language both literally and figuratively

So given all these great benefits of printing in country, why do so many games companies (even Kickstarters) print over seas. In the first instance there is only one over-riding reason; COST. Simply it’s cheaper per unit to print overseas than in either the US or Western Europe. The difference in cost can be staggering, quotes for my game in the UK were coming in at around $25 – $35 for 1000 units, my base cost in China is closer to $12, even with transportation costs this doesn’t come anywhere close to $25. Prices in Eastern Europe (Poland/Czech) aren’t necessarily quite as good although you can get some excellent prices and you have the benefit of working with a company within the EU. So bearing in mind the huge financial benefits to printing overseas, what are the downsides?

You need to find a reputable printer who is easy to work with and both of these can be a challenge if you’re not fortunate

Language can be hard if the printer’s contact staff don’t have good English

It can be hard to assess quality of materials unless your printer is willing to send you pictures or samples

You can feel a bit disconnected from the process

You may have both VAT to pay (reclaimable in the UK if you’re VAT registered) and import taxes (Games are 0% rated in the UK and come under the import code 9504908000)

So how can you lessen the impact of these downsides? Find yourself a great overseas printer. This is down to word of mouth recommendations for people that have used them. I was very fortunate to hit upon Wingo Games almost straight off the mark. They were kind enough to provide a couple of references one of whom had been another Kickstarter project. The references were good so I asked them to quote on the game. I was immediately impressed by the level of contact that I received from Wingo, despite the fact that they company turns over millions of dollars a year my contact, Ivan (they all use western names to make themselves easier to interact with), made me feel like I was Wingo’s only customer. I have contact with Ivan maybe every couple of days and he’ll regularly drop me a line just to ask me how things are going. His English is close to perfect.

They were very flexible with me for my sample games which was very much appreciated as samples are very expensive. Typically a printer will have to include the same set up costs for a big print run in the costs for your sample games. This means that some of the quotes that you receive for samples can seem astronomical so flexibility here is very much appreciated.

The next thing that impressed me was the quality of the sample games:

Here is Creature College in all its glory. You can’t feel the quality of the materials but suffice it to say (and I fully accept that this is a little bit weird) I sometimes just run my hands over the box to feel the finish! I was very impressed with the quality of work from the thickness of the box cardboard and design of the insert straight through to the print quality in my rule book.

Finally you want to feel that your printer is a real partner. As you can see from the title picture Wingo Games has shared a stall with me at conventions and we’ll be at Essen together in the fall. I don’t heap praise on a partner without good reason but Wingo Games are a vital piece in the potential success of Happy Otter Games and Creature College.

I hope this little guide has been useful. If you’re interested in my experiences and just want to chat about your own project then feel free to drop me a line at orhan@happyottergames.com. I’m happy to put people in touch with Wingo but you can also contact them yourself at sales06@wingogames.com.cn.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to Creature college Update 12

Sheesh, well it seems like a age since I managed to update everyone! So what’s been happening since our last update. Our big news was that our sample games arrived from China and our fabulous printer Wingo did an awesome job. The sample games look terrific and they arrived just in time for UK Games Expo where we managed to meet a bunch of our great fans and play some really fun games of Creature College. It’s also let us send copies out for review and we currently have two reviews pending with some more planned.

We’re also now firmly in launch mode with a bunch of stuff happening in the background to get us ready for Kickstarter in late September. We’re working with our friends across at Ironbelly Studios in Montreal on our Kickstarter video, preparing the artwork for our stretch goals, working with our designer on our Kickstarter page, setting up distribution networks and basically figuring out the 100 other small details that will hopefully ensure that we’re “Not at home to Mr. cock-up” at any point during or after our Kickstarter campaign. 🙂

We’ve also been planning how we will share a stand at Spiel 2015, Essen with our fantastic printer Wingo which will be slap bang in the middle of our Kickstarter Campaign!

We went a little crazy with competitions in May/June. Not only did we give away our customary monthly competition prize (Kimberly Snelgrove) and ran three impromptu competitions on The Boardgame Group, but we also gave away over 40 prizes in our UK Games Expo competition.

As always we’d like to give a shout out for a couple of other Kickstarter initiatives that we think are worthwhile. Currently both are a little ways from their funding targets but they’re both really great projects. The first is Foe Hunters by Larry Lembke of Spellforge Games. The second is “For the Love of Spock” run by Adam Nemoy, Leonard Nemoy’s son who is trying to get the funding for a documentary about his fathers life in time to have it ready for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek next year.

Sample Copies of Creature College

We believed it was very important for us to have full production quality copies of Creature College to send out for review and to play with at conventions so we’ve worked very hard with Wingo to make it happen. Below you can see what the game actually looks like and what we will deliver to Kickstarter pledges.

UK Games Expo

UK Games Expo was fantastic. We got to meet so many great people who really made the show for us. We ran many demo games and Creature College was very well received by everyone who played a game. It was great to meet all the brilliant folks from the Boardgame group, Katerina Demeanour, Ty Voyce, Declan Noonan, Matt Prowse and Dan Voyce for dinner and games on the Saturday night. A huge thank you as well to all our friends who pitched up at the stall to give us support with the best game of the weekend almost certainly being with Dan Macmillan, Garry Hewitt and the Northampton crowd. Also many thanks to Leon from Wingo who helped make it a great show for us and was kind enough to gave away dice to everyone who came to our stand! Perhaps the biggest star of the show for us though was Ty Voyce who made us a whole pile of *branded cupcakes*! Thanks again Ty…they were scrummy!

The Kickstarter Video

We’re working on our video with the great folks over at Ironbelly Studios in Montreal and we can give you a sneak peak into some of the work that we’ve been doing with them to prepare for our Kickstarter.

Please back Foe Hunters!

Our friend Larry Lembke from Spellforge Games has launched his Kickstarter for Foe Hunters. This is a great game with some stellar reviews so go and take a look at it and help Larry make his funding target!

As always it’s been another really busy week! We were very pleasantly surprised at the beginning of the week to be contacted and invited to attend a mini-con called Dragondaze which takes place in Newport, Wales on the 19th of September 2015. We’d really like to give a shout out for Dragondaze as all the proceeds from this event go to help Bernado’s young carers, a really worthwhile cause. We were also very fortunate to be introduced by our media studio to the folks at Greenbrier Games, they have a wealth of experience in launching Kickstarter campaigns and had a lot of very good advice. We’re looking forward to having a closer relationship with Greenbrier as we move closer and through our own Kickstarter campaign.

Ninja Dice

Greenbrier also have a current Kickstarter campaign for an expansion to their Ninja Dice game. You can find the Kickstarter page here. They’re a great company and this is a very slick game so head over to Kickstarter and give these folks your support!

Design Work

It’s been a huge week for design work. Our incredible board game design ninja “Will” has been hard at work and has completed the designs for our mission cards, ability cards, research lab cards and game boards. We’ll be sharing some of this design work in our monthly news letter so go ahead and subscribe if you haven’t done so to get an inside view of the world of board game design.

February’s Board Game Competition

Our board game competition this month was won by Kris Kosche from Germany. As soon as she’s decided we’ll tell you what game she went for! If you missed it don’t worry, there’s another chance to win this month. All you need to do is subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be automatically entered into the draw.

Rules Booklet and Cover Art

So we’re taking a big step towards a finished game this coming week as we’ve started the box artwork and we’re working on the rules booklet. Nearer to our launch date we’ll release our rules on our website as a downloadable pdf. Until then we’ll be releasing snippets of information or if you want to find out exactly how the game plays come along and find us at one of the conventions listed in our events calendar, we’d love to see you!

Project X

We’ve made some great leaps forward on Project X in the last few weeks but we’re on a little bit of a hold now as other work takes priority to prepare us for UK Games Expo in May. Keep an eye out here though as we will be releasing more information about Project X as the year moves on.

It’s been another exciting week for us here at Happy Otter Games. The highlight of the week has been an invitation to take part in London Anime and Games Con on the 4th and 5th of July. That finishes up our round of games conventions that well be going to starting with Dellcon in March and finishing just before our Kickstarter goes live with Essen. For more details take a look at the events page on our website. Come and find us at any of these conventions and we’ll be happy to play a game with you!

Art & Design work

Our design work has come on leaps and bounds this week. We’ve now finished the design for our mission and ability cards and our designer has started work on the research lab cards. We’ve officially finished over half the design work and we’re well on the way to hitting our end of April target for having a ready-to-print game. Our artist has been working on the Plasma Canon battle card towards the tail end of the week and this weekend is a milestone as we start work on the box design.

Play-testing

With the completion of much of the design and artwork we’re ready to going into our final phase of play testing where we share the game more fully with an extended group of play testers. At this late stage the game plays pretty flawlessly so we’re expecting this to be mostly small alterations to balance more than anything else. There are two play testing groups we know of that have volunteered to help with this final phase but if you’re in the UK and you’re interested, let us know!

Project X

We can’t tell you much about project X other than we saw some of the first footage from the studio we’re working in with in Montreal and it blew our socks off! We can’t wait to show you some teasers but that will have to wait until the summer!

The monthly competition

February’s win a board game competition is nearly over but it’s not too late to enter! Just subscribe to our news letter and you’ll be entered int a draw to win a board game of your choice up to a value of £40 ($60).

It’s been a busy week here at Happy Otter Games, but through a haze of coffee and small nibbly things we’ve made some great progress! Creature College has a card deck containing 2×27 creature cards and as of today we were officially 22 cards in. Only five left and we’re done on our creature deck. We’ll be introducing you to more of our cast of monsterousness over the next few months. We also finished the creature card design work so now we have both our Creature Cards and Player Mats finished. As always a new game is never really finished until it goes to press so there may be some small changes as we enter the final stages of our play testing!

Essen

We finally booked Essen this week after far too much time procrastinating. The folks over at Spiel 2015 were fantastic and talked us through the process of booking a prototype stall (significantly cheaper than a full publisher stall). For those that don’t know Spiel 2015 is probably the biggest game show in Europe and takes place in Essen every year.

Legal Stuff

We’re also a fair way along our trade marking adventure with all our early submissions being excepted so barring any disasters our branding is here to say.

Project X

We can’t talk much about Project X other than to tell you that it’s going to be awesome! Project X made some leaps and bounds forward this week.

Well that just about rounds it up for this week. Have a great last week of the month all you lovely people and subscribe to our Newsletter to have a chance to win the board game of your choice in February (£40($60) limit).